If you stay, be prepared to cry. You won’t be able to help it, so you might as well leave this movie within the first 10 minutes if you don’t want to leave the theatre a moist and pruny mess with a just little less dignity.

Yes. If I Stay, this R.J. Cutler-directed adaptation of Gayle Forman’s novel about a young woman hovering on the point of death, is unmitigated shlock. It bores a hole into your chest and won’t stop drilling for emotion until it strikes a gusher.
And several cheap gouges later, it gets there.

But first, we have to endure the instigating tragedy in addition to the fragmented backstory, which serves as a breathless buildup to romance.

Chloë Grace Moretz (Kick-Ass, Carrie) plays Mia Hall, a good kid who plays the cello to perfection, much to the surprise of her hipster parents (Joshua Leonard and Mireille Enos) who weaned her on punk and New Wave. Musical tastes aside, Mia falls for Adam (Jamie Blackley), the dark-haired rock star who flirts with her outside the practice hall.

Though none of them have fangs, skin that shines like diamonds or a need to engage in a life-or-death competition, the characters look and sound a lot like other teen lovers we’ve become accustomed to seeing since Twilight exposed new demographic terrain.

These latter-day Romeos and Juliets are always separated by some seemingly insurmountable boundary, and in this case, it’s the ultimate distance between life and death: A car accident leaves Mia in a coma, but over the course of the film, her consciousness wanders through the landscape like a ghost, looking at the people she would leave behind.

The nurses and the doctors all tell her to fight. And a part of her wants to stick around, but another part of her is ready to let go.

So what makes life worth living? Should she stay or should she go? This indecision may bug you, but it’s the fundamental question in the book, not to mention that nagging existential sigh that follows us to sleep. Fortunately, it’s one director R.J. Cutler rightly recognized as crucial to every other piece that followed in his Vancouver-shot film.

Mia’s life has meaning because she loves people, and is loved by others. The more Cutler develops these relationships into believable, substantial bonds, the sharper the movie’s blade will be when it finally comes time to land the mortal blow.

The former documentary producer and director does a good job with the family ties, shooting the scenes with Enos and Leonard with an eye for the smaller details in their performances, and finding the layers of love he needed to make his movie more than a two-ply tissue to wipe sloppy content.

But for all his surgical skill, the movie flags whenever Moretz and Blackley have to create the requisite spark. And so much of this movie depends on their youthful fire that it eclipses everything else, including the more poignant family scenes.

It’s the smell of teen spirit that finally keeps this movie hemmed into its niche alongside Hello Kitty cellphone covers and centuries of bodice-ripping fiction. If I Stay will make its target audience of teenage girls weep and swoon, and it may even seduce a few Gen X’ers with its funky parents. But this girlfriend-in-a-coma story won’t just leave you feeling softer in the heart. It will leave you softer in the head, too.